Tabula Rasa Shutting Down, Follow-up Interview

In a somewhat surprising turn of events, NCsoft has announced that they will be taking the Tabula Rasa servers offline on February 28, 2009.

To the Tabula Rasa Community,

Last November we launched what we hoped would be a ground breaking sci-fi MMO. In many ways, we think we’ve achieved that goal. Tabula Rasa has some unique features that make it fun and very different from every other MMO out there. Unfortunately, the fact is that the game hasn’t performed as expected. The development team has worked hard to improve the game since launch, but the game never achieved the player population we hoped for.

So it is with regret that we must announce that Tabula Rasa will end live service on February 28, 2009.

Before we end the service, we’ll make Tabula Rasa servers free to play starting on January 10, 2009.

We can assure you that through the next couple of months we’ll be doing some really fun things in Tabula Rasa, and we plan to make staying on a little longer worth your while. For more details about what we are doing for Tabula Rasa players, please click here.

Stay tuned for more information. We thank you for your loyal support of the game and encourage you to take us up on the benefits we’re offering Tabula Rasa players.

The Tabula Rasa Team

To get a better idea of why they felt this was their best course of action, Massive Gamer Magazine had a quick chat with NCsoft Austin’s David Swofford:

(The decision to terminate it was purely a business decision,) said Swofford. Simply put, they looked at the game’s profits and compared it to their other titles and it was clear that it no longer made financial sense. A tough reality, but not altogether unexpected after their South Korean parent company posted poor Q3 financials and Richard Garriott, the man whose name is on the box, left the company earlier this month.

(Giving the game about a year to find its place in the space out there was a good amount of time and effort,) Swofford said of the news. He had no comment on why they believe the game failed to reach its potential. (It just didn’t make good business sense to continue the service.)